Licked by Our World We Get Licked by Our World
by Christopher Citro
How to say
there’s nothing to do in the slump
of the body against all we can’t
control, in the kind of O only water
shapes the mouth to make.
~Monica Berlin, “What Keeps Coming the Rain, Yes & Also All That”
The first time I almost drowned was before I can remember. Mine was not an aquatic birth, but I did enter this world during the mercifully brief vogue for hurling newborns into water, supposedly triggering some innate ability to swim left over from when we were seafood. “You sank like a brick every time,” mom said.
***
Two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, stuck like thighs to a leather chair in August. Like two old friends who still drink to excess together and end each visit with a big hug instead of a kiss. Like a tiny solar system where each one takes turns getting to be the sun. We’re 80% water. Or we’re 75% water. The earth is 80% water. Or 90% water. I forget which, and it seems like it’s different every time you see it. Last week on Facebook I saw a meme that said something like We’re 90% water so basically we’re cucumbers that worry. Why is this interesting? Because if anything is 90% something you’d expect it to look and feel like the thing it’s 90% made out of, right? And when I hold your left hand in my right hand I’m not thinking Evian. Or South China Sea. Or bathtub or puddle.
***
The next time I almost drowned was because of my brothers. It was a sunny day and one of them brought me to his girlfriend’s house up the road. Walking along the edge of her parents’ pool shining like a flat emerald in the yard, minding my own business, my brother picked me up and threw me in. It didn’t come as a surprise. They were always doing this. The next in age was twelve years older than me and consequently had what in boxing is called a weight advantage. It got to be where I’d avoid walking near water if one of them were around.
I recall being lifted out of my life—excuse me, I was heading somewhere to do something—my body losing control inside the grip of another body, being airborne, which was nice, then the hard slap of liquid, the cold shout of the pool against my ears, and the chlorine panic, flailing my limbs to fight off the water. Unable to breathe while at the same time screaming.
***
Here’s something you can use to torture me if we ever meet and you’re a secret agent and I’m a nuclear scientist. I’m profoundly jumpy about looking into deep water and seeing things. A tree branch pops into view from the murk, and the hairs on the back of my neck snap stiff like quills upon the fretful porpentine. The one occasion I ever scuba dived, even the quarters I scavenged along the swimming pool floor gave me the willies. What am I afraid of? Will a dead, bloated face jump out at me like it did to Richard Dreyfuss exploring the submerged wreck in Jaws? Well, yes. But it must be more than that.
***
JOE: (sitting on his bedroom floor before a cabinet of glass bottles each with labels tied to their necks) It all started with—you gave me a leaf and some water from Lake Champlain because you know I’ve always liked that area up there. And so what I did was, when my grandkids come I have a map and I show them Lake Champlain and I talk to them about Champ, the monster in the lake. And they say, “Does Champ really exist?” And I say, “I don’t know, but people believe in it. It’s a legend, and this is the water.” And they really get into this water.
So then what I did was I contacted the Loch Ness people to buy water. I sent them some money, and I never got it. For a whole year we emailed back and forth. They finally said, “We’re just going to return your money, you should have gotten the water by now.” I said, “No, I never got it.” So the next year I ordered again, and I didn’t get it, again. I wrote them back, and the lady that ran the company said, “I feel so bad about this I’m gonna go down right now.” So she went down to Loch Ness and she took this (hands me a photograph showing a bottle propped up with Loch Ness in the background, a label around the neck reads For Joe Citro).
ME: (lifts the bottle, reads from the label): Loch Ness Water dot co dot uk. And it’s got a little tartan ribbon around the top.
JOE: So now we got Lake Champlain, Loch Ness, and we’re gonna get Cleveland water because of the monster in Lake Erie.
ME: What’s that monster called: “Former Industry”?
JOE: I don’t remember. They have a picture of him taking a sailboat down.
***
There is life in the earth’s ocean trenches that doesn’t care about us, that doesn’t need the sun, that has nothing to do with light. All life on earth, be it you, me, the bacteria in your lover’s gut, edelweiss on a Swiss mountainside, insects who live in the upper atmosphere and never come down for a look-see, fish so large they could eat themselves and keep swimming—all connected to the sun one way or another. Thanks to photosynthesis, we’re all earthlings in a shared cycle, consuming animals that eat plants that live by sunlight.
And then there’s a whole other biosystem. Yes, marine snow showers waste and dead fish in a disgusting blizzard feed the vampire squid and sea cucumbers, but that’s not how the abundance of life survives the deepest ocean. Massive clams, ghost fish, supergiant crustaceans, all pale as moonlight, and limited in scope to vents along the furthest seafloor and lower ocean trenches, blowing out hot smoke from within the earth. Thanks to chemosynthesis, bacteria and microbes live on the warmth, the methane and carbon dioxide, and six-foot-tall tube worms chomp the bacteria. Organisms die, organisms suckle on the detritus, the cycle continues. Who needs the sun?
Since the sixties, our un-personed spaceships have visited. Thirty-six thousand feet below sea level, barely above freezing, with eight tons of pressure per square inch making lungs impossible, and to survive the difference between your body and the surrounding sea has to be close to nil. Consider single-cell amoebas a full four inches wide. Breath exhaled from the earth. The life that clings to the lips, life that clings to that life. In a world where it’s always night, where night has no meaning because it’s never day. I want to go there. When they say, “You are blah blah percent water” keep in mind you’re blah blah percent salt water, more deep sea than snowdrop. I cannot go to the darkest oceans. None of you can either. We never will. We share a planet but not a location.
***
Another time I almost drowned was with my mom. She’d taken me shopping in the nearby town of Chagrin Falls, named, legend had it, because its European settlers were so annoyed at encountering a cascade large enough they had to pack up and carry their boats through the woods. After getting groceries at Buy-Rite, and a cheeseburger lunch at Dinks, my mom and I went to a park just upstream from the falls to feed the ducks. Picnic tables, the smell of sugar cones and mowed grass. Mossy trees along the shore with overhanging roots like miniature villages. At some point, I slipped into the river. It wasn’t very far down but then I wasn’t very tall. The stones covered in a slick green scum, me reaching wildly for my mother’s arms. The roar of the nearby falls in the air. My mom tried for me, lost her footing, and fell shrieking into the river. Like me she also couldn’t swim. I must have heard my mother scream in fear before. I must have seen her arms flail frantically prior to that day.
***
One hundred million years ago, much of the central United States sat submerged beneath a shallow inland sea stretching up from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean above Canada. That’s why you can find sea fossils in Kansas. Scientists call this the Niobraran Sea, but back then it probably had no name. To the giant inoceramus clams, fifty-nine foot mosasaur marine reptiles, and sixteen-foot squalicorax sharks that lived there it was just Home.
***
As a kid fishing on Kashwakamak Lake in Ontario, Canada, I caught a smallmouth bass with another hook already in its mouth. The hook connected to fishing line which connected to a fishing pole I’d lost overboard the year before on our previous trip up from Cleveland. That day I’d been sitting in the back of the rowboat, daydreaming as usual of robots and girls, when an unexpected hit yanked my whole pole over the edge before I could grab it. We spent some while searching with a weighted treble hook to no avail.
I like to think we let the fish go. Was it the same one that pulled the rod into the lake the year before? Did it survive twelve whole months tethered in one place? Could I live with that guilt? Catching and eating a fish was one thing. Keeping it prisoner for a year at the end of a line another. The weeks and weeks. Fellow fish swimming by, wondering why that one guy doesn’t follow. Autumn leaves sweetening the currents. The ice closing over in midwinter, slowing the flow along the muddy bottom. Spring blossoms falling in from the shore. The warm orange light of another summer penetrating the gloom. Still stuck in the same spot.
***
JOE: (lifts another small bottle from the shelf, reads the label) This is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. We were at Falling Water, and there’s a part in the house where the water actually falls down.
ME: From the stream?
JOE: Yeah, so I captured this. (lifts another bottle) At Disney World, Florida—(sings) “It’s a small world after all.” Jake got this, this is from the ride It’s a Small World After All. (lifts another bottle) This is from Luke, this is the Washington State Convention Center.
ME: Like from a drinking fountain or something?
JOE: I don’t know. (lifts another bottle) This is Punderson, where we used to take the kids when they were little, where the hotel is haunted. This is Punderson Manor. (lifts another bottle) This is the Seattle Space Needle.
I contacted Roswell and the Chamber of Commerce, and I said “I’m collecting this water for my grandkids and I’m telling them about —” And the lady said, “That’s crazy!” I said, “Can you go as close as you can go to where the UFO crashed and get me water?” She said, “I’m gonna do that, and I’m gonna mail it to you.” (lifts another bottle) So this is water from where the spaceship crashed.
Then I contacted the Bermuda Chamber of Commerce. I told her what I’m doing. I said, “I collect this water for my grandkids. I use it as a stepping stone to explain to them about legends—I don’t say it happened, I don’t say the Roswell crash was real—I say, but some people—” And the lady in Bermuda went nuts. She said, “Are you trying to sample our water to see if it’s polluted!?” I said, “I’m not trying to do anything.” She goes, “We’re not going to send you any water.” I said, “I’m just collecting—” So anyway, I never got that.
Then I tried contacting the closest base to the North Pole and the closest base to the South Pole, because I wanted them to send me ice. And I spent a week trying to find this one guy. The first thing he said was, “First of all I got to commend you, that you even got in touch with me, cuz no one can reach me. But I’m not there anymore. If I get back there—and I know the guys on the South Pole, too—I will send you ice from the North Pole and the South Pole.” (pause) Which I never got.
***
Maybe I saw Jaws too young. The film came out the summer of 1975, when I was a mere tadpole of two, so it must have been some while after on late night TV, with the swears and breasts edited out. I have no memory of seeing Jaws for the first time, but monsters in the water, looking into pale blue—blue like the blanket on a bed, soft cotton that expands as you pull it over your head to make the boogeyman go away—out of which endless teeth fly at you with a relentless demigod attached at the other end—that must have had some permanent effect.
I know I heard that threatening bass score in my head when I first waded into The Wave at Geauga Lake, our local amusement park circa 1984. In a huge pool, a mechanism at one end created a six-foot wave every five minutes, rolling toward the toddlers and parents trying not to skin their knees on the rough bottom. Along the back wall, a huge painting of a wave with bug-eyes and white fangs. Yes, it was a little sad I suppose, the most unpleasant thing about those waters the urine which built up in no time and stained the turquoise floor a sort of sickly chartreuse. Yellow and blue make green! like the Ziploc commercials taught us.
***
Another time I almost drowned was when I was fourteen or so—mapped in acne—vacationing with my parents in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. I’d ventured out past the wave breaks—bouncing on my tiptoes, barely able to keep my mouth and nose above the liquid—and soon tired. This is what it feels like to die, I thought to myself. It can happen on a sunny day with my mom and dad in sight, not very far off on the beach. I tried to cry out and got a mouthful of salt water. My thin arms flailing about in the waves making zero difference like always. As each swell passed I watched people on the shore, laughing, eating ice cream. Then the sea would rise and—I am going to die. A couple swam by, and I said, “Excuse me mister. I’m drowning and I can’t make it to shore. Can you please save me?” I remember what it felt like to say this, admitting defeat, the man’s arm around my shoulders and that’s all.
***
For years when I was young, my parents and I flew down to Florida over the Christmas holidays to visit two of my brothers. We’d spend whole January days at the beach, a welcome relief from the stifling gray northeastern Ohio winter. Somewhere there’s a photograph of me at fifteen, in a wet suit holding an underwater crossbow, posing in the knee-high brine.
From my diary:
Sunday 1/18/87
This was the greatest day of the whole vacation! As soon as I woke Joe said we would go to a different beach and then have a cookout. As we were getting ready, Joe gave me his old wet suit for snorkling. It fits me perfect!
We got in the van and in about an hour reached Sunshine Skyway. We drove next to the bridge that broke. What happened was that a boat was comin under the huge, gigantic bridge on a foggy night. It hit a pillar and the whole middle of the bridge fell away. Then a Greyhound Bus went over and fell. 35 people died and 5 survived. It was eerie seeing the bridge.
We pulled the van right up to the beach next to the highway. There’s nobody else around except for the cars. It was a hot day. I went snorkling for the first time and had the greatest most peaceful time of my life. On the way back we got a snack at McDonald’s to hold us over till the cookout. Later I got to take vidio tapes of everyone. We had ribs and chicken. Then when everyone went to bed I watched Bachelor Party and Howie Mandell.
***
In the 1980 movie Altered States, William Hurt eats so much acid he turns into a caveman. You should see the film. It starts with 70s intellectuals having cocktails together—the beards, the corduroy, the enormous eyeglasses—and ends with a monkey-man tearing up a warehouse lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. Somewhere in there Hurt’s character tries out an isolation tank. The deal is: it’s a coffin half-filled with tap water crammed with so much dissolved Epsom salts you can float. The solution’s body temperature, and it’s dark as the inside of your mom in there.
While an undergraduate at Ohio University, I booked a session in the new wellness center’s one iso tank and experienced my consciousness burst the bounds of my body in which it had not previously felt constrained. It seemed I was floating in the sky, and then I became the sky. Minutes later I gently bumped the side, and if you didn’t know a cosmos-sized consciousness could retract into the body of a 5’11” philosophy major in the matter of a nanosecond, well it can. And it’s nauseating.
***
I’ve got my little head and it’s got a thirty-foot pine, which is a tight fit. I wanted spring in here—ice pellets click against the windows—and my brain gave me this. I pet my brain—thanks, brain—like a cat. But for our smallness we’d wreck this joint. I think of hiding the pine on your side of the bed but you’d notice. That’s why I follow you around this house. I see the chair because you see the chair. Tell me how we’ll take a trip this year, visit the ocean, the rolling of it coming at us, giving up, coming at us, giving up. We make a break for gas station sandwiches then rush back. Licked by our world we get licked by our world. Coming at us, then giving up. Coming at us, giving up.
***
I’ll let you in on a secret. One afternoon fishing on Lake LaDue, my dad and I pulled our rowboat onto an island no larger than a baseball diamond and ate lunch sitting on the shore. After the cheese cracker packets were empty, we floated a Styrofoam cup—empty of nightcrawlers—a few feet out and sat there tossing wet pebbles. Some plopped into the lake, just missing. Some landed inside, lowering the cup a little each time. The sun like butter on everything, the water, the rocks beneath the water, the sugar maples, my short little legs. In over forty years, this is one of the best moments I’ve spent on this planet—and I’ve seen David Bowie in concert, made love in the National Zoo.
***
JOE: (lifts another bottle, one that doesn’t match the others) This is something—I don’t really like having it here but it was given to me so I keep it. What happened is, there’s this West Virginia prison—and they’ve closed it—in Moundsville, and it was very violent. They had this room in the basement that when the inmates were terribly bad they’d put them in. It’s called The Hell Room, or The Death Room, or The Red Room—(consults the label) it’s called The Murder Room. So they would take like thirty-forty bad inmates and they would put them in there and they would just kill each other.
ME: Wow.
JOE: My kids go there on tours and I can’t stand that they go there because I don’t like the energy. But when Jake was in The Murder Room he went in the corner, and there was this stagnant water, and there was a bottle in there, so he took the bottle—this is West Virginia State Penitentiary Murder Room water.
ME: And it’s in a mini E&J Brandy bottle like from an airplane. Yeah, that’s got a different energy than your other waters.
JOE: I’m gonna get some water from church—some holy water—and put it in there.
***
Syracuse, New York—with its 15,000 lead water service lines still in use today—sports a FAQ page that explains our tap water comes from Skaneateles (pronounced “skinny-atlas”), a Finger Lake southwest of town—supplemented with Lake Ontario during droughts. Skaneateles Lake is one of the cleanest in the world. The high quality of the water makes it possible to utilize the lake’s water without filtration. The unfiltered lake is merely coarse-screened, chlorinated for disinfection, and fluorinated to promote dental hygiene. It’s then re-chlorinated and has phosphate added for corrosion control.
***
I caught a sea monster once. Joe and I put his boat in the Manatee River to fish the meandering, brackish grass flats out toward Tampa Bay, passing alligators sunning themselves along the shore. Have you ever seen an alligator in the wild, nothing between the two of you but some fluid through which it has evolved to swim especially well? It shuts you up for one thing. You go all rigid and watchful. You make sure the guy running the boat keeps his hand on the throttle. Yes, it’s majestic. Please keep going.
Amid the yellow jackets and cheap cigars, I hooked something that took a full thirty minutes of fight to reel in toward the boat. When the leader finally rose from the water, out of the murky brown coalesced a face. Not a fish’s hatchet features, but a set of dull staring eyeholes and a mouth which peeled apart revealing an unsettling slit in a white wall like the mouth of the alien leader in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wishing us greetings from the limitless universe. A glacial cliff within me calved, sending a wave of cold crashing across my inner seas.
Reader, I hooked a stingray.
My barbed curve of steel had penetrated the back of the poor creature. Joe and I donned gloves as he grabbed pliers and I immobilized the venomous tail which can whirl around and puncture a person as easy as saying “Call me Ishmael.” Once unhooked, we released our unwilling prehistoric visitor, wide wings undulating along the edges as it flew back into the darkness.
***
My parents did eventually book me for community ed. swimming lessons—making the effort—in the pool of a country club just down the road from the middle school. Some of my classmates had memberships there. My family didn’t. Mrs. Timmons soon lost patience with my body, gyrating to no useful purpose. Except one afternoon trying to tread water (“ride an imaginary bicycle with your legs, push imaginary sand back and forth with your arms”) something happened. Making what seemed the same ineffectual motions as always, some internal shift occurred, and I stayed afloat. With ease. Not only that but I instantly felt I could expend a quarter of the effort and float even better. My body figured something out without my head being involved at all. Remember this, I told myself, so you can do it again.
I never remembered.
Even today, my swimming is still more like sinking while fighting off monsters.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, forthcoming), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His awards include a 2019 fellowship from Ragdale Foundation and a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. Recent poetry appears in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Best New Poets, Narrative, Pleiades, Blackbird, and Alaska Quarterly Review. His creative nonfiction appears in Boulevard, Quarterly West, The Florida Review (2018 Meek Award winner for CNF), Passages North, and Colorado Review. He teaches creative writing at SUNY Oswego and lives in Syracuse, New York.